Tuesday, 22 July 2008

“When exactly do we go from being children to being just people? I do know it's not about turning a certain age or graduating from school. It happens when we’re not paying attention. We go from playing with our friends, to playing with our friends’ feelings.

"Without our knowledge or consent, childhood slips away in the night, and our innocence escapes us. And we wake up one morning to find we have become, who we are.” William Krudski

Hands up all those who feel older than they used to? Anyone? It’s something that’s been playing on my mind for a while now.

I look around at my friends, who are all starting to turn 30, and I don’t see the difference from when we were 11-years-old, going running or playing on our bikes, but do other people see us as older? I’m not sure it’s so straight forward as it used to be.People’s fashions and tastes have changed so much. You think of the sixties, seventies and eighties and you thing of really bold images especially in the clothes people wore. You could see children of one era dressed very differently to their adults of another. Today the lines seem blurred. We are a mix and match decade of all the ones that went before, in clothes, music, architecture, everything! Even our politics seems generic.

Young people try to be older, old people try to be younger and we all get a bit lost in the middle.

Perhaps it’s not even as straightforward as that though.

My friends’ parents were married with children by 27 and for a long time that has been the norm, but I look at myself and my friends an I don’t see that happening anytime soon. It’s as though we’re the first generation to have been given the chance to keep hold of a large part of our childhood into our 20s, and are obviously in no hurry to give it up.

I look at those people from an older generation and it’s clear that they really are the same people underneath that they were in their 20s. In a way this period now for my generation should be the best time of all; young and energetic enough to do what we want, with the means at last to actually do it, without the responsibility that’s lying ahead of us, with some of our childhood dreams still intact.

It should be a magical time and perhaps a last chance to put any finishing touches to the blueprint of our lives.

We should be out there getting things done while we have the chance, not sitting here writing about it :) but I do like the thought that later in life I might be able to come back here, read my own thoughts and perhaps remember something of what it felt like to be in this time.

William Krudski says it best: “People say we’re growing up too fast. Sometimes they make it sound like it's our fault or at least, our choice, but how can we not? We feel invincible when we know so much. One thing I do know is that we're so eager to lose our innocence. And I wonder if one day we'll look back and wish we hadn't?"

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